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Patient and public involvement (PPI) is increasingly central to the delivery of health services research. However, it has proved challenging to evaluate the impact of PPI on the implementation of research into clinical practice and health service delivery. The purpose of this paper is to develop and test a conceptual model explaining how PPI in the research process might impact on implementation.

A scoping review of knowledge translation and implementation science literature was performed to develop a conceptual model of the impact of PPI in research on implementation. A retrospective case study of a research project was used to illustrate the model.

The authors identified five domains in which PPI can impact on the implementation of research into practice. The review demonstrated that successful implementation depends on developing relational models of knowledge production, valuing experiential knowledge, engaging in collaborative practice, making use of knowledge brokers or tools for knowledge facilitation and embedding these factors into the implementation context. In the case study the authors were able to find examples that illustrated each of the five domains of the model.

The paper builds on existing endeavour to evaluate the impact of PPI in research, demonstrating that it is possible to model, conceptually, the processes whereby PPI in research might impact on practice and service delivery. By illustrating those processes through the exemplar case the authors also demonstrate the potential for the model to be “operationalised”, allowing the impacts, on practice, of PPI in research to be systematically and directly evidenced.